Movie Landmarks for CGI Effects?

Daniel German asks: "I am in the process of preparing a lecture on the influence of computers and computer science in the movie industry. I'd like to include excerpts from the most important landmarks, and in order to give credit where credit is due, I'd like to ask for help from the Slashdot community. What are those movies and moments? The Westworld robot vision; the city landscapes of Blade Runner; Final Fantasy; Toy Story; the water beings from The Abyss; the starting sequence in Forrest Gump; bullet time; and so on. What do you consider to be the scenes that have become landmarks in computer generated special effects in Movie History? I am not only looking for Science Fiction, in fact, I'd like to have a wide range of examples on how computers have altered the way that a director can bring his or her vision to the screen "

Comments

Tron

[The Clockwork Troll]

I think the scene when Flynn gets digitized in Tron (1982) will forever be memorable to me.

Made me think for a while (I was 6 at the time) about whether that could really happen to me while I was futzing on the computer.

Predator vision

[DrSkwid]

Star Wars vector graphics guidance system

Luxor Junior & the other Pixar early movies

actually, do you own research

CGI or SFX?

[Tumbleweed]

Computer-generated, or special effects in general? Big difference there. You can drop Westworld if you're talking CGI, BTW.

If just SFX, hey, Ray Harryhausen (sp?) did some great stuff "back in the day". Certain 2001: A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff. There's nothing in there that looks any worse than Star Wars: A New Hope, and it's a lot more realistic. (Fighters using aerodynamic maneuvers in space? Yeah, right.)

Certainly a lot of technology was invented at ILM for the first three Star Wars films, and you've gotta respect that.

Terminator 2 for the morphing.

Aliens for mixing live action and miniatures (the duel between Ripley and the alien queen was a mix - amazing stuff; just saw a special on the Alien series last night - AMAZING work and you never notice it's fake - that's why it's so great).

For non-human CGI, nothing has surpassed the original Jurassic Park, really - it's pretty much levelled off there, if not gone down a bit, likely due to budgetary concerns. The stuff Weta did for the LOTR movies is great, but isn't groundbreaking in terms of anything other than sheer scale.

For CGI humans, I'd have to say 'Final Flight of the Osiris' in the Animatrix is the best I've seen (same people that did the Final Fantasy movie), but it still has a long ways to go. The skin _still_ isn't right, though the movement is almost perfect. Hair is good, but not great (yet). I suspect hair will be perfected before skin will.

Here's the killer idea: what happens when the only thing left to artificially generate are the voices? Artificial voice actors? Yikes!

Re:CGI or SFX?

[NanoGator]

"A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff."

Not sure exactly what this sentence meant, but it reminded me of something little-known about 2001. The computer displays they had in that movie were not computer generated at all. They were hand animated.

The amazing thing is that they're damn convincing. They had rotating objects, for example. They actually shot video of a rotating object and the animator traced over it frame by frame to film and play on the screen.

Kick ass stuff. ;)

Re:CGI or SFX?

[Gaijin42]

Actually, Westworld had the first CGI ever. The targeteing system that Yule Brenner had overlayed over what he saw was computer generated. It took a rediculous amount of time to render each frame.

Monday Night Football.

[rjh]

If you watch Monday Night Football, you'll see a bright yellow line superimposed on the field representing the first-down line. This has made a significant change for viewers at home; it makes it much, much easier for a viewer to tell whether it's fourth-and-inches or first-and-ten. It's a great example of how CGI has changed the viewing experience for the better: the change is subtle, innocuous, doesn't distract from the plays, and was not possible before the fusion of cameras and computers.

Re:Plagiarism....

[Greventls]

Well, provided he cites Slashdot, what is the problem. For some of my papers, I have cited IRC conversations and the like. The teachers/professors usually put question marks by the source.

Non-Sci Fi examples

[Felgerkarb]

As sort of a history buff, I was totally enthralled by the cgi recreation of ancient egypt in the opening scenes of the Mummy. I got an even bigger eyeful, of course, with The Gladiator and reconstructed ancient Rome. I think these are great examples of cgi creating not only fantastic fictional settings, but also in creating real, but impossible to film, settings.

Rambling Thoughts

[linuxwrangler]

I used to have a freebie subscription to a magazine which I believe was called "Computer Graphics". It may be around now but I haven't had a subscription in years.

It would be worth looking through back issues as frequently a front-page article dealt with breakthroughs and problems in CG. The oceans in Waterworld, animating hair, and so on.

It also had interesting articles on geeks and directors. I don't recall if it was Casper or Toy Story but one article mentioned the difficulty encountered when the director mentality collided with the computer animation mentality. The director kept going back to the animators for more "takes" while the geeks thought they had delivered finished product (hmmm...that actually sounds like a pretty common type of IT/management complaint outside of CG as well).

While it's easy to grab sci-fi adventures as examples as the CG is obvious (well done, perhaps, but we know that the death-star or pod-racer or whatever isn't real) don't forget to include examples where the CG is invisible - just another tool in the box so the director can add or modify elements in everyday scenes to create his or her vision.

In fact, if you are looking for influence you might concentrate on looking at the shift in tools over time. Sci fi flix have been around a long time but we no longer hang pie tins from strings. We used to blow things up for real but now it's frequently just bits and bytes. As we get better and better, CG becomes a more cost effective way of creating ever more parts of a movie. Given how well dead actors have been integrated into live-action films you might conclude that eliminating the actor (or at least outsourcing the mo-cap to India) is the "final frontier".

Re:What the f are you talking about?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It's worth noting that Larry and Andy W cited Godel, Escher, Bach as an influence in an article in Time or Newsweek at around the time the original Matrix was released.

Fincher & Jeunet

[babbage]

In my opinion, the two most interesting modern masters of special effects, by a wide margin, are David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Fincher is probably known to most Slashdot readers as the director of Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room, among others.

Jeunet is a French director, and wouldn't be as well known if not for the fact that Amelie was such a big hit a couple of years ago. In addition to that movie, he's also the director or co-director of City of Lost Children and Delicatessen.

(Interestingly, it turns out that Fincher and Jeunet also did the last two Alien movies, Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection. Neither reviewed very well, but both directors have gone on to establish pretty good reputations; it would be interesting to go back & watch them in comparison to their more recent work. In any case, I haven't seen these two movies, and they're not why I choose them as among my favorite modern filmmakers :-)

---

In any case, the thing I love about these guys is that, unlike a company like Pixar or a director like (say) James Cameron, these guys have digital special effects so ingrained into the way they make movies that it's no more of a gimmick than, say, choosing a camera lens of film stock to work with. Their movies are for the most part not gratuitous special effects extravaganzas, full of the standard pyrotechnics, monsters, and other gimmicks that are the hallmark of the standard, standard boring effects fare. (Okay, maybe trolling just a little in that last bit... :-)

Just to pick a few random examples off the top of my head:

• In "Amelie", almost the whole movie is washed over with a greenish-yellow tint. The first impression this gives may be a sense of the old sepia-toned movies & photographed, but that's not right: sepia tone is tan colored, not green or yellow. Jeunet got the effect by digitally pushing the color palatte in post-production so that, like the choice of soundtrack music, the tint of the film would help set the mood. Very subtle.
• In "Panic Room", Fincher does of a series of tracking shots that would be impossible to do with a physical camera. One of these shots has the camera make a perfectly straight zoom from one end of the apartment to the other, going smoothly over furniture, under cabinets, and through the handle of a coffee pot. In another shot, the camera zooms through a keyhole to shows what's going on in the next room, and in yet another shot the camera goes in through a ventilation grate, down the duct, and out another grate in a different room. These camera shots are only possible because the coffee pot was never there, the keyhole was either not there or was part of a carefully done jump-cut, and the ventilation shot is all cartoon, seamlessly blended into the rest of the action.
• In "City of Lost Children" -- which is a really wonderful movie by the way, like a weird, beautiful 21st century fairy tale -- one of the characters is a hitman who's weapon of choice is a trained flea assassin: as he plays his music, we see the flea leaping down the street, finding its quarry, jumping on the scalp, and injecting a poison among the hair follicles on the skull. All of this is done from the flea's point of view: those hair follicles loom as large as oaks. But there's little gratuituous about it: if you want to have a flea

Re:Remember where it all started:

[bakes]

The features on the Tron 20th Anniversary edition DVD also cover quite a bit about the CGI, the companies they used and why, how they did certain things. It's very interesting, and a good insight to early CGI.

What I found ironic was that the movie didn't get an award for special effets, since the Academy considered using a computer for special effects to be 'cheating', but only a relatively small part of the movie used the CGI. All of the backlight glow effects and such that gave the movie the feel that it had were all done manually.

Re:The landmark effects...

[mr3038]

I consider Forrest Gump to be THE landmark movie in this area. It is FULL of "invisible effects"

I agree. Forrest Gump was the first movie with lots of CGI stuff that went unnoticed by most people.

My list would be like:

1. Terminator 2 (1991) - the first movie where the computer animation didn't look cheesy and still played a major part.
2. Jurassic Park (1993) - the first movie to have believable CGI characters. Jurassic Park was scheduled to be shot with animatronics only but some stuff was later remade with computers. Contrary to belief of many, the whole Jurassic Park movie had only a few minutes of CGI animation. However, nobody ever noticed the seams between animatronics and CGI.
3. Forrest Gump (1994) - the first movie that had lots of CGI shots without the audience acknowledging it.
4. Toy Story (1995) - the first full length fully CGI animated movie
5. Final Fantasy (2001) - the first movie that was fully CGI animated and still looked a little bit like the real stuff.
6. ??????????? - the first movie that was fully CGI animated but the audience didn't acknowledge it unless pointed out.

It would be wise to mention that most (all?) new animations are done with computers. I don't know which was the first movie to use mostly computers to render the final picture instead of handpainting everything. It's also worth pointing out that latest consumer hardware could probably render Jurassic Park level graphics in real time. We still need some time before our games look like Jurassic Park because games don't have the luxury of hand tweaked animation for every single frame.

Re:The landmark effects...

[schon]

... are the ones you never see.

True..

Listen to the director's commentary for Blade2.. there's a scene in the sewers, where Ron Perlman sticks his gloved hand into the sun, and his glove starts to smoke..

The smoke was CG.. Guillermo del Toro makes a big deal about how he loves to use CG for stuff like that - stuff that could easily be done with other methods (and usually is)..